- News
In the news: December 2020
…data resulted in a split decision - about 40% thought "yes", 47%" maybe or not sure and the rest, "no". More senior scientists were more likely to say "yes". Jeremy Fox, the author, offers several ideas about the poll results and why public sharing is… - Case
Temporary exception to double anonymised review policy
The journal conducts double-anonymous reviews of all manuscripts submitted. As part of the decision process, reviewers routinely receive a copy of the decision letter, which includes reviewers’ comments. In the transition to a new editorial staff, a change to the email template inadvertently meant that the full letter was sent out, including the corresponding author’s name. Before this was disc… - Case
Duplicate submission or self plagiarism. Is the author to blame?
…proceedings. The reviewer sent us the article downloaded from the conference website highlighting the overlapping paragraphs, which was nearly 80%. The journal wrote to the authors asking for an explanation. The authors stated that they had submitted an abstract of their work for participation in the international conference. The abstract was accepted on the condition that they submitted the… - Case
Retrospective registration, outcome switching and ethical approval
…="https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorial-policies/white-paper-on-publication-ethics/3-5-correcting-the-literature/">https://www.councilscienceeditors.org/resource-library/editorial-policie...). In general, the correction options are errata, corrigenda, expressions of concern, and retractions, although some of the wording is nuanced in ways that might be helpful in this situation. The editorial note referenced above seems to fall under the category of an Editorial Expression of… - News
Research integrity and how to buy a Persian carpet: TOP Guidelines, part 2
…Picture by Garry Knight (Flickr: Persian Carpet) CC BY-SA 2.0 at http://bit.ly/2FKpQCo In “The art of buying a carpet,” Simon Busch suggests that a wise carpet buyer checks a carpet’s knot count (“You will find much truth under the carpet: turn it… - News
Guest editorial: the challenge of AI chatbots for journal editors
…="http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10jvv3q/eli5_what_exactly_is_text_burstiness_and_text/">where precise meaning is required eg in a legal sense) and burstiness (rare words appearing in a text) of the text. This might present an additional challenge for some authors using this software. Their writing may be detected and flagged up as… - Seminars and webinars
Seminar 2021: Authorship for sale
…the paper mills webinar, 14:00pm - 15:30pm (BST / UTC +1) on Tuesday 20 September Useful links Systematic manipulation of the publication process, COPE guidance, updated 2022 - News
In the news: December Digest
…international group of authors in Ophthalmology topics selected 200 references from PubMed and then checked them for Open Access status. Those that were paywalled were examined to see if they were available at established institutions in low income countries or through HINARI. There was a lot of heterogeneity from 0% full texts to 95%, with a mean of 47% availability. Use of complementary "alternative ways"… - Case
Excessive self-citation in a book chapter
The case concerns an introductory chapter in a book. The publisher was first contacted about potential misconduct as part of a broader investigation into an academic who was a coauthor on an introductory chapter in a book. The publisher's subsequent investigation identified excessive self-citation in the work (one of the coauthors is named as an author on 12 out of 16 referenced works).… - Case
Unauthorised reviewer challenges
A paper submitted to a journal with a single anonymous peer review policy was assigned to a prospective reviewer, who agreed to undertake the review. The reviewer then sent an email addressed to a number of different research group and institutional mailing lists calling for volunteers to review the paper. The reviewer attached the PDF of the paper, which had been downloaded from the submission… - Case
Academic freedom
A final year student, and two other researchers in law, all from the same university, undertook research into a recent court judgment on the rules in relation to civil servants making public comments. Based on this research, a manuscript was drafted to be submitted to a double anonymised peer reviewed journal. The manuscript is highly critical of the judgment’s reasoning and impact. All three a… Press
…transparency and best practice released 15 September 2022 The fourth edition of the Principles represents a collective effort between the four organisations to align the principles with today’s scholarly publishing landscape. Guidance is provided on the information that should be made available on websites, peer review, access, author fees and publication ethics. The…- News
Editor to Editor support for Journal Management
…Practices for Journal Websites (INANE collaborators 2016). Another related project is the recently published paper examining 80 nursing journals for adequacy of their author guidelines, conducted by Oermann and colleagues ( - Forum discussion topics
Ethical considerations around book publishing
…technology to access individual chapters, without accessing the whole book, so ethical statements on a chapter level is desirable. Who is responsible for ethics in book publishing? If journal articles are published with a CC-BY license, can the author publish a similar article in a book as a chapter? From a copyright legal perspective this is allowed, as long as… - Seminars and webinars
Webinar 2022: Managing paper mills
…Practical steps for managing paper mills September 2022 During Peer Review Week COPE hosted a webinar for journal editors and publishers on the practical steps to take in managing paper mills. Speakers described their experience of managing paper mills affecting their journals, with practical tips on how to manage systematic… - Forum discussion topics
Best practices for guest edited collections
…different from the conference proceeding paper. See the STM Permissions Guidelines (2022) for alternative proposals.' Q: Keeping in mind that it is common practice to publish preprints on repositories such as arXiv (where there is not a proper review but in any… - News
Diversity in Peer Review: Survey Results
…nominating/selecting members for its peer reviewer pool (25%) …has diversity policies for selecting peer reviewers when evaluating individual manuscripts/applications (26%) …provides in-house training to promote diversity and inclusion in peer review (13%) …provides training to potential peer reviewers, to promote diversity in its peer review pool (14%) • Additional… Seminars
…Council) can be downloaded here. Stephanie Harriman [BioMed Central], posted a report on the seminar on the BioMed Central blog site, here. Scholarship recipients COPE awarded two…- News
Conflicts of interest focus
…Related resources Editorial conflicts of interest COPE Forum discussion 2022 Undisclosed conflict of interest in a published article COPE article 2021 … Diversity policy
…the Executive Officer or to a COPE Officer. Please refer to the grievance policy (being reviewed) for details. Related content Other COPE policies Page history First published 10 September 2022 Back to top…